"If you watched Tuesday's Democratic debates, you probably noticed a whole lot of yelling. Indeed, the event, sponsored by CNN, was a veritable white-knuckle ride of hollering, with most of it coming from just one guy -- a guy who looked like he just received a nasty shock trying to jump-start his DeLorean in a shed filled with half-baked inventions and sad, peeling posters celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This guy also specialized, I should add, in occasional, disgusted harrumphs.

"I'm talking, of course, about Bernie Sanders, who may not have won the debate, but who certainly set the tone. It was amazing to behold: In a country where just 26 percent of voters describe themselves as 'liberal,' the Democratic Party has apparently gone full-bore, hair-on-fire Oberlin dorm room progressive.

"Sanders' poll numbers with Democratic voters -- which hover around 25 percent, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average -- are astounding, given the fact that he aims to haphazardly micromanage our country back to the economic Stone Age."

"Hillary Clinton won. She won because she's a strong debater. She won because Bernie Sanders is not. She won because the first Democratic presidential debate focused on liberal policies and not her email scandal or character.

"The embattled front-runner won herself a news cycle or two, because she stretched the truth and played to a friendly audience. It won't always be so."

"Drama over Tuesday night's Democratic debate has disinterred an important question from liberals: Why is the party establishment so scared of having voters see their presidential candidates on TV?

"... the Democrats have limited the number of their debates to just six, compared to the Republicans' eleven. Even worse, they've scheduled them for time slots when few other than hardcore supporters will watch. They'll be like those Potemkin debates in the Senate that you see on C-SPAN, in which a senator is on screen proclaiming rhetorically as though to a crowd, when everyone knows that the chamber is empty and he or she is doing it just for TV.

"Except in this case, the TV audience won't be there either. Tuesday's debate will be the most accessible of the lot even though it is scheduled to begin during Game Four of a drama-filled Mets-Dodgers National League Division Series. The next debate is scheduled for a College Football Saturday night in November. The third is scheduled for the Saturday before Christmas. The fourth takes place during a three-day weekend in January."

"The Republicans have decided to have a little bit of authentic democracy within their party, and polite Washington is flipping out. ...

"The House is about to find out whether the more energetic conservatives long dissatisfied with the leadership of John Boehner can effectively put forward one of their own for the top House job -- and, if they do, Congress and the country are about to find out what that means. As a way of settling a genuine political dispute, this could hardly be improved upon.

"Washington retreats to its fainting couch. A passionate fight over ideas, over how we govern and to what ends? Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"

"Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly withdrew from the House speaker's race on Thursday, a casualty of a fractured Republican conference. The Californian didn't do much to inspire confidence last week when he suggested that the House Benghazi committee had been designed to attack Hillary Clinton.

"One pity of the McCarthy comments is that they tainted the committee's work with politics. The bigger pity is that they are dead wrong. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy is 18 months into the committee that the House purpose-built to investigate the 2012 terrorist assault in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. His Benghazi investigation has been a model of seriousness, professionalism and discreetness. ...

"Keeping the Benghazi committee on the straight and narrow hasn't been fun. Democrats work with Mr. Gowdy in private but then berate his committee in public. Conservative activists and talk-radio hosts blast him for depriving them of the drama they crave -- for not running a get-Hillary committee. The State Department blocks him. And now his own side has made his job that much harder.

"Don't expect Mr. Gowdy to give up. He has run his committee with one goal in mind: finding answers for the families of four dead Americans. Mrs. Clinton flatters herself if she thinks it's all about her."

"The Constitution's Framers, knowing that executive officers might not monitor themselves, provided the impeachment recourse to bolster the separation of powers. Federal officials can be impeached for dereliction of duty (as in [IRS Commissioner] Koskinen's failure to disclose the disappearance of e-mails germane to a congressional investigation); for failure to comply (as in Koskinen's noncompliance with a preservation order pertaining to an investigation); and for breach of trust (as in Koskinen's refusal to testify accurately and keep promises made to Congress). ...

"Even if, as Koskinen says, he did not intentionally mislead Congress, he did not subsequently do his legal duty to correct the record in a timely manner. Even if he has not committed a crime such as perjury, he has a duty higher than merely avoiding criminality.

"If the House votes to impeach, the Senate trial won't produce a two-thirds majority needed for conviction: Democrats aren't ingrates. It would, however, test the mainstream media's ability to continue ignoring this five-year-old scandal, and would demonstrate to dissatisfied Republican voters that control of Congress can have gratifying consequences."

"[Obama is] not about to try building consensus on gun policy among people of good faith. He'll take the same approach he's taken throughout his presidency: He'll delegitimize opponents of his sweeping agenda as irrational, self-interested enemies of decency and progress.

"As the Washington Examiner's Byron York recently noted, Obama has a long history of trying to shut down disagreement by accusing his critics of politicization. He accused Republicans of trying to politicize abortion, the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Iran deal, Benghazi, and the scandals at the IRS and the VA. Just last week he insinuated that Hillary Rodham Clinton's disagreements with his Syria policy (or lack thereof) are influenced by the fact that she's running for office.

"The common denominator in all of these cases is Obama's unimpeachable certainty that he has a monopoly on all the good arguments and all the best motives. Now he even claims the exclusive right to politicize issues when it suits him."

"Each time there's a shooting like the one that took place in Oregon on Thursday, a choir of politicians and pundits rises up to pretend they have known all along how to stop such incidents from happening. If only people had listened to them in advance!

"What they wanted to tell everyone all along was that one or another gun control proposal would have solved the problem.

"They are not only wrong, but they are also fueling the dumbest kind of policy discussion possible, the demand that lawmakers do something, anything, even if all of the solutions under discussion are proven failures."

"Pollsters surveyed by POLITICO have a unanimous warning for the Republican National Committee and the TV networks who are using public-opinion surveys to exclude presidential candidates from debates: Don't trust polls to detect often-tiny grades of opinion in a giant field.

"Indeed, the unprecedented reliance on polls to winnow the Republican field is coming at a time when many pollsters feel they're blinder than ever to trends in public thinking -- and that using polls to keep out candidates who are otherwise well qualified could seriously alter the race.

"'Polls are being used to do a job that they're really not intended for -- and they're not as qualified for as they used to be,' said Cliff Zukin, a professor at Rutgers University and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research."

"Why is Putin moving so quickly and so brazenly? Because he's got only 16 more months to push on the open door that is Obama. He knows he'll never again see an American president such as this -- one who once told the General Assembly that 'no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation' and told it again Monday of 'believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion.'

"They cannot? Has he looked at the world around him -- from Homs to Kunduz, from Sanaa to Donetsk -- ablaze with conflict and coercion?

"Wouldn't you take advantage of these last 16 months if you were Putin, facing a man living in a faculty-lounge fantasy world? Where was Obama when Putin began bombing Syria? Leading a U.N. meeting on countering violent extremism.

"Seminar to follow."